As part of the March 2004 issue
of the "Application of the month" series on KDE.de, Andreas C. Diekmann
has interviewed Lars Doelle, author ofKonsole. Konsole is what is known as an X terminal emulator and gives you the equivalent of an old-fashioned text screen on your desktop, but one which can
easily share the screen with your graphical applications. The Dutch KDE website is
offering an English translation of the interview
and the overview of this issue. Many thanks to Tom Verbreyt and Wilbert Berendsen for their help in translating this issue.

Comments

Konsole is a great app and by far the best terminal emulator I have ever seen, but I never understood why I can't use the CTRL+T shortcut to open a new tab. I just get a visual bell signal, although I have assigned it in the options.

I thought it might be blocked because ctrl+t would be a bash shortcut (like ctrl+d is for instance), but it works in gnome-terminal

I know it's off topic, but I don't know where to look for information. The Spanish KDE website (KDE Hispano, es.kde.org, www.kdehispano.org) is down (ans has been down for about a week now). Does anyone have any news on this?
Thanks!

I can't even imagine my life without using konsole ;-). It brought so much sanity to my everyday work. I always keep several shells open: one for root, two or three in different projects I am working on, one on a remote machine, etc. I switch back and forth, change fonts if needed, etc. Lovely app.

screen keeps a configurable number of lines in each virtual terminal buffer. You can see previous screensful by typing "^Z[esc]" (thus entering copy-mode), and using your page-up, page-down, up ,and down keys. Press any non-copy-mode key ("Z" works) to go back to normal mode.

I'll note that I use screen *with* konsole. One ssh session in konsole per host, each with its own screen session.

Uh Uh, I didn't mean any of these assertions. KDE is one of the two big Linux desktops, I understand it is the most popular but I couldn't care less. It just works great for me.

Now, you might be able to compile konsole by itself if your kdelibs' version is greater than 3. I am not sure though. However, I recommended upgrading the whole desktop environment simply because the original poster is certainly several features everywhere. And it is much faster and safer, at least in mandrake, to upgrade the whole kde than compiling stuff by yourself.

Konsole is a great application, and I use it quite extensively every day. However, one thing bugs me about it that I cannot seem to resolve. Prior to KDE 3.1, selecting (highlighting) text in Konsole would automatically copy it to the clipboard. From there, I could go to any other application, and use the Paste function to paste it (in addition to the standard X11 method of middle-clicking).

As of 3.1, however, this functionality was changed so that text is not automatically copied to the clipboard; you have to manually click Edit, Copy to be able to then use the Paste function in another application to copy/paste text. Yes, you can still middle-click, but this is often limiting (middle-clicking to paste text in a browser's URL bar, for example, is an awful experience - you highlight the text you want to copy/paste, click on the URL bar (which automatically highlights the current URL to delete it) and then you paste... the same URL that you already had loaded.)

I presume this change was made as a convenience, which I can understand, but I can't figure out any way to change it back. Basically, I'd like to do one of two things - either revert the behavior back to it's pre-3.1 style, or just be able to manually copy the text I have highlighted (eg., a hotkey sequence like Ctrl-C). I've tried the hotkey method before, but that didn't want to work for me either.

I think this is a setting in Klipper (assuming you're running it). Look in "configure Klipper...", and choose "Synchronise contents of the clipboard and the selection". This reverts to pre-3.1 behaviour (for me).

"Synchronise contents of the clipboard and the selection" is an
additional feature that some people might want, but is not the
same as the pre-3.1 behavior. The klipper documentation explains
that X keeps it's own clipboard which is separate from klipper's
clipboard. The problem is that the new version of kde seems to
have disabled X's clipboard. I also am having this problem and
selecting "Synchronise contents of the clipboard and the selection"
doesn't fix the problem (even if it did, I still would prefer the
old behavior of having independent clipboards). Any help would
be greatly appreciated.

How Proprietary! Predefined Schemes!
In the font menu, we can choose 'custom', but I'm sure glad we don't get the option in the Schema menu! Yup, I just love it when some programmer decides what we're allowed to customize and what we're not. We should all switch to Microsoft and vote CMD as the "Cool new application of the month"!

What if we don't like the four preconfigured transparent schemes we get? What if we want to make it fit in with our desktop? I guess we have to suffer, eh? Or vote for some OTHER console! Anybody ever tried ATerm?

There are a huge number of indispensable utilities available in the command line. Nothing beats a shell for admin work, programming, etc. Nothing. Even Microsoft is enhancing their command line stuff. These users may be over represented right now among linux users. I don't hear them denigrating people for using and prefering graphical tools to draw pictures. Why have a heavy weight application when a simple lightweight shell utility works best?

In my work, among other things I maintain digital control systems for buildings and refrigeration plants. Invariably they come with some pretty graphical displays. Note I said maintain, not install. There is a reason for that. They are sold on the premise that pretty pictures will help the unskilled maintain their systems. I can't lie very well, so I can't sell them. But I digress. The graphical screens are inevitably useless for the technicians that maintain the systems. They only show things, maybe accurately, maybe not. To fix problems require white text on black, or the inverse. Changing configuration, reprogramming, etc. And what happens is the graphical screens, which are an expensive useless addon, get out of sync with what is happening in the system. We don't maintain them since the software to do so is hugely expensive and proprietary, and the customers can't see any payback anyways. So they end up being an expensive boat anchor.

Graphical programming is very expensive in resources, manpower and engineering. In some situations the costs are worth it. Most times they are not, especially with embedded controls with limited hardware. What that means is the graphical effort takes resources away from the basic and necessary stuff, like control algorithms, hardware design, etc. What we end up with is a pretty useless piece of junk.

So don't go ragging on command line tools. They work. That alone puts them above 95% of everything else. And when money is on the line, I'll go for what works. That way I may get paid for my effort.

Expensive and proprietary to keep the graphical environment up to date? Jesus, sounds like Linux needs a lot of work. If they're such boat-anchors, maybe it's time to change the operating systems. You could go with a version that comes without X11, maybe? Maybe if all you GOT was white text on a black screen, They'd be less boat-anchory?

Then again, You never have problems with Microsoft Operating Systems getting "Out of Sync" with themselves, since the graphical environment Only Reflects what is true in the command-line.

Hey, Go with BeOS if you want something impressive, though. Then you don't have to worry about tools for graphical maintenance because the company's dead! They won't be MAKING any more tools! =D FUN!

Does anyone know how to get konsole to set the last executed command to konsole's window title. For example issuing the command 'find /' would set the title as "larry@localhost: find /" or for telnet sessions to other hosts like "larry@otherhost".

It appears this can't be done (from bash, at least). The shell command that can be used to get the last command - fc -l - could potentially work, *except* that it appears the last command isn't entered into the history at the time the prompt is prepared. (Try setting PROMPT_COMMAND to "fc -ln|tail -1" - you'll see not the last command, but the one before that.)

The closest one can get is to put $_ in PS1; unfortunately this is only the last argument to the last command, so it only works if the command had no arguments. (i.e. for 'find / -name foo', you'd get just 'foo').